Though controversial, the potential for even the tiniest interactions between this mysterious form of matter and the more familiar varieties could provide the crucial evidence needed to explain the missing quarter of the Universe.

Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts had already gone back to the drawing board on dark matter when the results of the EDGES project were published earlier this year.

“The nature of dark matter is one of the biggest mysteries in science and we need to use any related new data to tackle it,” says theoretical physicist Avi Loeb from the Center for Astrophysics.

Dark matter is one of the sharpest thorns in the paw of astronomy today. It makes up something like 23 percent of the entire Universe – 80 percent if we’re just talking about the building blocks of matter.

But as the name suggests, it doesn’t exactly burn brightly with clues advertising its true nature. We know it exists because something extra seems to be holding galaxies together, other than the shiny stuff we can measure.

Now an unexpected shift in the data provided by the EDGES experiment just might provide some of that missing evidence.

The Epoch of Reionisation referred to in the EDGES acronym covers a period in the history of the Universe roughly 200 million years after the Big Bang. Atoms of hydrogen had only recently congealed out of the soup of charged particles as expanding space cooled, and were being washed in the glow of the first stars.

This shower of UV radiation punched electrons from the atoms, ionising the hydrogen once again and allowing the atoms to absorb a small amount of the background radiation still echoing through space from the Universe’s beginnings.

EDGES created a profile of the sky’s radio waves that could be used to describe the behaviour of the radiation-absorbing hydrogen during this crucial period of cosmic history.

While the data is still fresh and yet to be critically pulled apart by the astronomical community, early reports are noting the hydrogen’s temperature is only half of what models predicted.

Separated from their electrons and yet to be stirred up by other astronomical weather, these clouds of ionised hydrogen would still be slow enough to feel the tiny pull of even the smallest of charges.

At a millionth of the electromagnetic pull of an electron, this tiny nudge from a small proportion of dark matter particles would be all but invisible today, but would be enough to cool slow-moving hydrogen.

If it feels like grabbing at straws, we’re more or less at that stage when it comes to this frustrating mystery.

Loeb and Munoz insist their model doesn’t rely on the EDGES results, but simply offers a unique take on some of its more unexpected numbers.

“We’re able to tell a fundamental physics story with our research no matter how you interpret the EDGES result,” says Loeb.

Future studies of this epoch will either refute the idea or expand on dark matter’s potential brighter side.